“Anything you ever wanted, I have given you. Why would you do this to me? Why, after I have done so much for you, why would you do this to me?” he demanded, his genuine old-country Italian accent becoming more and more obvious as both his rage and fear swelled.
Jasmine only shrugged and shook her head, refusing to look at him. She was dead. She knew it. There was nothing she could do to avoid what was going to happen now. She couldn’t run, for he would catch her. She couldn’t fight him, for he was much too strong. And she couldn’t even scream for help because Samantha, the only person that would have ever been even somewhat inclined to help her, had selfishly betrayed her by putting her own needs ahead of hers.
They passed a marked police patrol car going the opposite direction as they headed east on Apache Trail, and Mister Giovanni appeared to sink down in his seat as though they might identify him through the darkly tinted windows of the Cadillac. No, Jasmine knew that she could not even hope to do something to flag down a passing cop or otherwise expect some form of police intervention. Mister Giovanni had many, many friends in low places, and he had very deep pockets. Anyone that could not be bought could just as easily be silenced in one way or another, even the police. How else had he been able to do the things that he had over so many years without being caught? He wasn’t entirely subtle about his crimes. He simply knew the law down to the letter, and thus he knew how to work around it. And, of course, he knew how to bribe or muscle his way through the times when dancing around the law wasn’t enough.
“I never should have trusted you. I never should have loved you,” Mister Giovanni said, perhaps simply thinking aloud than truly addressing her. “I knew you would do this someday. You are just like the others, just like any other woman. You lie, you steal, and you use me. What I give you is never enough. You want more than I can give. I can never make you happy, never!”
Jasmine said nothing. She knew better than to speak when Mister Giovanni was angry. When he was like this, he was anything but reasonable. She wished that she could blame it on his vampiric tendencies, the symptoms of being close to bloodlust, but she knew he was like this even when he was physiologically at his best.
Mister Giovanni had an extremely perverse and pathetic concept of love that equated to prostitution. He honestly believed that all women were whores. He truly thought that love was simply a matter of how much he could provide them and how grateful and loyal women would be in return. He would buy them things or take them to places, and for that he expected them to reward him with sex. If he felt that they were being ungrateful in any way – essentially, if they did not act as though they worshipped him as a demigod – then he would discipline them in one way or another, usually in a physical manner. That was really as simple as their relationship had been, even from the beginning. She had been foolish, at least in the beginning, to have thought that his actions weren’t really as shallow and selfish as they had seemed.
Now, her foolishness was about to be the death of her. It was probably just as well that it ended this way. He would take her someplace and do something to her, something awful and violent, and then it would be over. He would call his other friends to help dispose of her body, or he might even do it himself, but whatever became of her after she died was really none of her concern. Nobody would miss her. Nobody would mourn her passing. Her family didn’t care – she was already dead to them. She hadn’t any true friends, not after Mike had driven them all away. The only person she had even considered to be an ally, hardly a friend, had apparently only used her as bait to lure Grand Duchess Raina Fallamhain into paying her a visit in person. While Samantha had been busy schmoozing with the celebrity vampires in her office, Mister Giovanni had made his inevitable appearance and whisked her away. Maybe this was exactly how it had all been planned from the beginning. Samantha had probably even called Mister Giovanni herself, for all Jasmine knew. That bitch!
No, she couldn’t feel like that about Samantha. That wasn’t fair. Sam had every right to be just as desperate as Jasmine about seeking the Grand Duchess’s help, perhaps even more so. While Jasmine’s own view of impending doom had been more of a rhetorical and presumptuous one, Sam had been facing a literal countdown to death. The woman was dying of cancer, a secret she had shared with her only just a few nights before. Sam only had a few months left to live – perhaps even less, considering that she apparently wasn’t seeking treatment because of her grim prognosis. Jasmine could have tried to find another way to escape, could have played this out more wisely, but she hadn’t thought to come up with an adequate backup plan. She had invested all of her hope into Samantha’s ability to recruit the assistance of Duchess Serenity and the Grand Duchess. Well, that had fallen through, and because she had committed herself so heavily to this means of escape, the price to be paid for failure was going to be terrible. She could only hope that it would end swiftly.
“I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know what to do,” Mister Giovanni groaned, almost whining. “What am I doing wrong? Why are you not happy? Why do you do things to make me unhappy?”
Jasmine finally turned to look at him, her expression utterly blank. “I only went to the club.”
“You went to her club! You went to that bitch for money instead of coming to me!” he yelled. “When have I ever told you no? When have I ever not given you money to buy nice things? Why would you go to her and not to me? What does she give you that I do not?” There was a pause as something passed over his face. “Are you fucking her?”
“No!” she replied with a disgusted look, finding the accusation to be absurd.
Jasmine had never been “into” other women, and she had only done the things that she had with others simply because Mister Giovanni expected it of her. Just as well, Samantha had never showed even a slight personal interest in girls, nor had she ever really been known to have done any girl-girl work in her fetish-themed photo shoots and videos. Sure, she did dress-ups, bondage, candles, and a bit of “slap and tickle,” as Sam called it, but no oral or toys or anything like that. Sam wasn’t like her sister had been. As far as she could tell, Sam was genuinely as straight as an arrow.
For the most part, whenever Jasmine had done anything with another female, it hadn’t been disgusting … but it hadn’t been very thrilling, either. It was always fake, always superficial. It had always been on others’ terms, always something she had done either to appease someone else’s interests or simply to earn a few extra dollars. Perhaps it was simply the context of nearly every occasion she had been with another girl that had turned her off to the whole thing, really. In fact, with the exception of Brenna, there hadn’t ever been a straight woman she’d ever met that had legitimately enjoyed the experience of even experimenting with other women when a man was present. Like Jasmine, apparently they were all just doing what they felt was necessary, feigning pleasure with women for the sake of pleasing their men.
Brenna had been the only one with whom it had been different. She hadn’t made it feel dirty. She didn’t make it feel like they were using one another, nor did she make it feel as mundane and unfulfilling as a clinical pelvic exam. No, because Brenna had been legitimately bisexual, and also the fact that she had been so personable and genuinely friendly toward Jasmine, it had actually been … well … pleasant with her. But because it had been in front of a camera, it hadn’t been special, nor had it been emotional, just nice, and not as awkward or degrading as the other times.
Because Samantha was so very, very different than her sister had been, Jasmine had never given a thought to the idea of what it might be like to be with her. Besides … she had retired from the porn scene, already, and Jasmine could scarcely even be called bi-curious. Having been there and done that with nearly all there was to be done, there was hardly anything left about which to be curious. So, there would never have been a reason for the two of them to get together in the first place. Samantha was very pretty and she seemed friendly enough, but … no.
Besides, it
would have been more than a little strange to be with another woman and then be with that woman’s sister. After all, she never would have dated the brother of one of her ex-boyfriends. What would be the point? Unless they were complete and total opposites, wouldn’t it just be more of the same? And wouldn’t the other person feel weird about being with someone with whom their sibling had been? Wouldn’t that seem to be like … well … some weird sort of indirect form of incest? Yuck…
Not that any of that mattered at this point. Soon enough, nothing in the world would matter to her at all. Even amidst her panic and dismay, her mind had wandered. That was just one of the ways she had learned to cope with times like this. If she could not physically escape, at least her mind was still free to drift away.
Dividing his attention between his driving and her, Mister Giovanni demanded, “Why did you go to her club? Why were you dancing?”
She shrugged, looking down at her bare feet. Jasmine had kicked off her high heels after he’d practically thrown her into the SUV, holding out a futile hope that she’d have an opportunity to make a run for it at some point.
“Answer me!” he yelled, slamming a meaty fist into her shoulder.
The blow momentarily numbed her entire arm, and she winced as the pain soon came while she rubbed the spot he had struck. Awkwardly, she answered, “I … I don’t know why.”
“Bullshit! You know!” He punched her in the shoulder again, though his knuckles smacked into the back of her right hand instead of her shoulder as she had been rubbing it. “Answer me, you little bitch!”
“I’m sorry! I don’t know! I swear!” she cried, leaning away from him. She fought a fleeting urge to jerk open the door and dive out of the moving vehicle, even though the act probably would have maimed or killed her. “I only … I wanted to dance, and … and…”
“And what?”
“And I … I knew you wouldn’t let me dance at one of your clubs, that’s all,” she lied. She wasn’t a terrible liar, but she couldn’t look him in the eye when she did it, especially not when he was scaring her like this. “I only wanted to dance because … I missed it. I liked dancing and … and you don’t let me.”
There was at least some element of truth to her words. At one point, she had indeed taken pleasure in being on that stage. But now, it was just a sad reminder of what she had become and of what she had done to put herself into this position. Tonight, quite literally, she had danced her last dance.
Almost a full minute of silence passed as Mister Giovanni appeared to actually believe that explanation. He wasn’t stupid … but he was terribly naïve when it came to some things. She knew him well enough at that point to expect that he would honestly believe whatever he wanted to, and that lying to him successfully was only a matter of telling him what he wanted to hear. He wanted to think that women were all nymphomaniacs, that love really was just a romanticized form of prostitution, and that women were genuinely happy to engage in degrading and humiliating acts because they lived only to please and serve men like him.
And again, while Jasmine had honestly enjoyed dancing at one point, and while the act of getting up on that stage earlier that night had been something of a thrill, it was more a matter of living out an exciting end to a chapter of her life with the expectation that another chapter, a much happier one, would be soon beginning. But what Mister Giovanni really wanted to hear was that it had been a sexual thrill for her, that she “got off” on the whole stripping routine. Yes, in some ways it was nice to feel wanted and desired, but not nice at all to feel used and exploited – something Mister Giovanni would probably never understand.
“You should have asked. If you had asked me,” he finally said with a nod, “I would have let you. I did not know that you liked to dance. You told me that you only did it for money.”
“I … well, I did … before I met you,” she forced herself to say. The idea of even pretending to convey a sentiment even vaguely close to love for him was nauseating. “You … you bought me things and paid my bills, so … so I didn’t need money. I was only dancing because I liked it. I liked … to be watched.”
Mister Giovanni grinned at that, exposing his fangs. Again, he was probably only willing to believe it because he wanted to. His fantasy perceptions of the female mind and the motivations of women were so warped and selfish that it was almost laughable. He probably believed that Jasmine and his other blonde mistress often made out and/or had sex with one another when he wasn’t around because they actually lusted for each other.
Even the blonde had readily confessed that she didn’t really care for getting intimate with Jasmine, but she considered herself to be an excellent actress. The girl sadly had expressed a desire to make it into Hollywood someday, even if only to be in adult films. Perhaps, like Jasmine, she had done a good job of making it seem like she really enjoyed their threesomes, good enough that he actually thought it was all very real. In his own mind, women liked nothing more than to molest one another while a male was either hammering one of them from behind, or sitting around nearby and sipping on a drink or smoking a cigar, watching with a smile and blowing smoke rings into the air as they put on a show for him.
Ironically, the only female that Jasmine had ever met that could have even possibly fit Mister Giovanni’s ideal – a bisexual woman who genuinely liked group sex and enjoyed showing off in front of a camera – was also the type that would have never wanted to have anything to do with him. She still found it nearly impossible to believe that Mister Giovanni had been Brenna’s Maker. Perhaps the rumors were true. Maybe Brenna really had been “the one that got away.” Maybe because he realized she was what he wanted, and because Brenna would have never wanted to be his, he had chosen force over finesse. And then, once he’d had her, he had thrown Brenna away like yesterday’s trash … literally.
Grand Duchess Raina had refused to publicly discuss the confrontation that had taken place between Brenna and Mister Giovanni shortly before Brenna’s death. The media and much of the public had scoffed at the notion that Brenna previously had been a victim in the matter. Nobody believed that she had only become his bloodspawn as a result of the time he had brutally raped and assaulted her and then left her for dead in an alley trash bin. That sort of thing would have made her a victim, and Brenna just didn’t look like the kind of woman that would ever allow herself to be victimized. Raina, maybe. But Brenna? Not a chance.
Anyone that had really known both Brenna and Mister Giovanni, though, would have found the truth much easier to accept. Truly knowing them both, it was hard to believe the incorrect but popular consensus that Brenna had only been another one of his eagerly willing, gold-digging trophy girlfriends – essentially, the very role that Jasmine had been playing out. It sickened her, the way so many had insinuated that Brenna had only been clinging to Raina’s coattails during her rocket-like ascent to power, and that Brenna’s death had been earned by her own supposed greed. Apparently, if things went the way that Jasmine was expecting them to go, people would probably be saying something similar about her, too, when she eventually turned up dead. Like Mister Giovanni, people often believed only what they wanted to believe.
“From now on, you only dance at my clubs. I don’t want you to go to her again,” Mister Giovanni informed her. He was much calmer now, so his accent was less severe. “Never talk to her again. She has been a problem to me. If anyone sees you in her club, if people see my girl working in her club and not in one of my clubs, then how does that look for me? It makes me look like an asshole. Do you think I am an asshole?”
“No,” she lied, now massaging the sore fingers of her right hand. “I’m sorry, Mister Giovanni. I didn’t want to cause a problem. I promise, I’ll never go there again.”
He nodded at that with a very satisfied look. The rest of the brief drive back to his house was peaceful. Jasmine found herself actually hoping that this might not turn out as badly as she had expected. Perhaps her cover story had worked after all. Maybe she really had man
aged to make him believe her lie, again only because he wanted to believe them. Perhaps she would have another shot at escaping. It probably wouldn’t happen that night, but maybe the next day, when he was asleep and confined to the house by the daylight, she could slip out and try again. Maybe she had been wrong about Samantha. Maybe she hadn’t known that he would show up when he did. If she could get away, get in touch with her again … maybe, just maybe, there was a chance she could still make this work. She dared to hope that the inevitability of a terrible death was, at least for the moment, not going to be so inevitable.
About two miles before their destination, Mister Giovanni reached into his suit jacket and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed someone and held the phone to his ear with his shoulder while he then dug out a cigar and lit it up. He rolled the passenger-side window down just a bit to let in some of the air without mussing his hair. Of course, the vile smoke from his stogie had to pass by her on its way out of the interior, making her eyes water as she tried not to cough. Cigarettes were bad enough, but she hated cigars with a passion. Mister Giovanni delighted in puffing away at them nightly, although perhaps only for the way he thought they made him look sophisticated and how they flaunted his status of wealth. If there was anything worse than kissing a bastard like Mister Giovanni, it was kissing him after he’d been smoking a cigar.
“I will be home in five minutes. Be there. Tell the others. And bring what I asked,” he said tersely before snapping his phone shut again.
The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations Page 53